Why we tend to be negative and paranoid
The man who opens the door to his hut, and believes he sees a tiger lurking, so he goes back in and shuts the door lives when there is no tiger, lives. The man who opens his door, does not see a tiger, but one is lurking, dies. We are programmed by evolution to see the nonexistent tiger, so we do. If at first, we cannot see the tiger, all it takes is a small hint from another we trust to see the tiger.
Comments
We live in a post-Cold War world; our foreign policy experts still live in the Cold War!11/23/2019 Trump’s Common Sense on Foreign Policy
I've written about this for decades. By the end of the 1960s, America needed to begin focusing on a new foreign policy direction. By the beginning of the 1990s, none of the underpinning objectives of our Cold War policies retained merit. But the foreign policy elite were experts in the Cold War, so they kept the structure and underpinnings of the Cold War theory intact. As I've said many time in the past, once a new paradigm appears, the experts in the old are the only ones you cannot go to for analysis or understanding. This is because they know nothing of the new, and their deep understanding of the old will mislead them when analyzing situations and information in the new. We've spent the past 30 years treading water in foreign policy. This is perhaps the greatest time-wasting ever. We need to rethink our entire foreign policy, and we need to eliminate most of the bureaucrats who are involved in policymaking. We need more than anything, fresh new blood who can look at the world as it is not as it was 40 years ago. Those new policymakers should be structuring policy, which will drive the US and the World towards a new socio-economic destination. We are amid the Crisis now; sometime during the next 10-15 years, we will have a cathartic existential crisis followed by a denouement and the dawning of the Rebuilding period, which will last approximately 20 years. The end of the Crisis and during the Rebuilding is when most of the large scale changes should occur. We will lay the foundation, however, today for many of these changes. Trump's genius is that he is an agent for change, which is what we need most at present. The agents for corruption and stagnation will not allow change to come without a fight. The change will mean the loss of their easy access to the gains of corruption and graft. The game is afoot. Tally ho! Trump: 'Historic' Durham Investigation Will Implicate Obama in Spygate
The fuse is lit, the time short. You might want to take cover; the Democratic Party is going to explode once the allegations and charges start flying. The essential reason for the impeachment circus is to provide a smokescreen under which the Dems can allege that the President is filing false charges to avoid or thwart the impeachment efforts. It is a present lie to obfuscate a lagging truth. Peggy Noonan Reminds Us Why Trump Won - Frontpagemag
The denizens of Washington all want the graft and corruption gravy train to continue. Each side has its favored cronies, who need to be fed and cared for. The politicians need the corruption, but so do the bureaucrats for they rely upon it for their power. Without the corruption racket, the size of the government would drop to perhaps 15-20% of its current size. There is no reason for all of these time-wasters to be on the federal payroll. The only reason is that bureaucrats sort out power and prestige by the size of the Director's budget and the number of FTEs employed. Noonan is but one of the pigs trying to get a turn at the status trough. The headline contains a hint as to why the Republicans (and Democrats) cannot seem to ever get anything accomplished. We need better politicians on both sides of the aisle. An election looms, please flush twice it is a long way to the sewage treatment plant! Half the population of Australia . . .
...lives in a few tiny spots on the Australian continent. Yet, those spots have urban growth boundaries that have driven the price of property prices to the highest levels. The accrues vast wealth to the older Boomers which forcing the young and middle-aged to pay Boomers huge sums of money for overvalued properties. Add to this that the Boomers in nearly every nation have been only paying about 75% of the taxes due while larding on debt for the remaining 25%. The Millennials will have to pay these deferred taxes. The Boomers have also been consuming the infrastructure built out during the 20the century by earlier generations but the Boomers are neither maintaining nor building new infrastructure to replace these now depleted assets. Also, don't forget that the Boomers have not paid sufficiently into their pensions and other old age accounts (here in the US Social Security, Medicare, and other old age accounts), nor have they saved sufficiently to ensure a comfortable retirement. Relax Millennials, you'll get to pay for all these items, but you will be able to use your mostly worthless degrees, which cost you dearly (while the Boomers college degrees cost them virtually nothing even after inflation adjustments). The Boomers have been the grasshoppers in the story of the ants and the grasshopper. If I was a Millennial, I'd cut the Boomers off and make them start paying their fair share. First up would be the elimination of urban growth boundaries and other restrictive zoning designed to drive up prices and favor one demographic over another. This is little more than age-related redlining. Then I would roll up my sleeves and get to work. But, alas, no, our Millennials have been spoonfed lies and pablum about saving the world by living down, so they seem more likely to take this abuse lying down. Sigh. Free People Don't Ask the Government for Permission
Free people tell the government what its demarked extent of authority is in a Constitution which strictly limits the grant of authority. The Supreme Court has a number of immature justices who cannot accept that We the People have granted our federal government a limited grant of powers. Instead, the Supreme Court Justices are constantly trying to unconstitutionally expand the peoples' grant of power to the federal government without proper amendment to the Constitution. This too may need to be addressed in the next decade or so. Students demand ability to select roommate based on race during days-long sit-in
We know you don't have to hold a sit-in to tell us you are racists. Then he beat it to death with an ugly stick. Boy howdy is that thing ugly. And who is just dying for a new electric Subaru Brat that will undoubtedly cost $80,000? Virtue seeking has become incredibly expensive! Ugly is the new beautiful, if you are trying to virtue your way into the Douchenozzle Club. Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update - Quillette Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update - Quillette
This article describes the confluence of two intellectual sewer lines. The first is the "status needs of the wealthy" intellectual sewer line. The second is the "immature individual's need to hide their deep flaws and imperfections" intellectual sewer line. The first is what Thorstein Veblen and the author, Rob Henderson, spend the bulk of their time discussing. The second is best understood by reading Eric Hoffer's book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements One of the points Hoffer makes is that individuals who recognize that they are imperfect but who are not mature enough to understand and accept their imperfections make optimum True Believers in a cult/mass movement. The progressive movement was and is a secular mass movement/cult. The cult manifests in the secondary secular cults of environmentalism, climate alarmism, and the other apocalyptical leftist beliefs which surface quite often but seldom gain traction due to their silliness (population bomb, ozone hole, acid rain. While these children at university do theoretically fall into the wealthy category, they more accurately fall into the True Believer category. The article does a fine job of outlining the wealthy category and I recommend it to you. The True Believer category is driven by the fact that these immature adults hate the self, the imperfections in the self, and the fact that there is a small chip of evil in each of us. It is their recognition of the fact that they have evil within them that drives them to find a way to cover that evil so no one else can see it. The secular cults like environmentalism and climate alarmism offer a near-perfect mechanism for covering the evil within the self. This is not an accident, the model is designed to achieve this purpose, it cannot exist or grow without this feature at its core. It works because the group offers the individual an opportunity to "save the world" by joining the group and following the mass movement's cant to the letter. Only by strictly obeying, and complying with the group's demands can the individual receive the group's support and accolades. Once the self-hating individual receives these benefits, they become strongly attached to the mass movement. This attachment and the emotional protection it provides is as strong as any addictive drug. The individual, now within the movement and needing to believe the dogma and act out the cant to the letter, is impervious to reason, argument, rhetoric, or logic as to why the movement's cant is false. The need for the protection offered by the movement outweighs the need to eliminate any cognitive dissonance. Just as the heroin addict can rationalize away socially unacceptable and criminal behavior, so the True Believer can rationalize away facts, logic, and reason. At elite universities, one of the key factors playing into the need for these mass movements is affirmative action. The immature adults accepted by the university often cannot compete with the students accepted on intellectual merit. The high intellectual level of the merit accepted students if far beyond the capability of many of those accepted via affirmative action. The result is that many of the colored students have trouble learning at the speed with which the classes are taught. These student's grades suffer, and they become frustrated. They also recognize that generally colored students do poorly when compared to other students. This is blamed on the racism of the professors, the administrators, the system, and the public more generally. It isn't racism, it is a mismatch that happens when those with lower intellectual abilities are placed in a pool of highly intellectual individuals. The cure is not more affirmative action, it is to address the problem of poor quality teaching in our K-12 education system particularly in our inner cities and colored communities, and perhaps even more important to repair the dilapidated state of the colored family. But these immature individuals can do none of this, what they can do is either accept that they have been mismatched in their university and move to a better match or join a mass movement and receive the protection of the cult. The mature do the former, the immature do the latter. Progressivism has always been a mass movement. The Democratic Party used to be a political party but it is now a part of the progressive mass movement. Mass movements are dangerous; secular mass movements are the most dangerous. The Catholic Church before reformation became a dangerous and deadly mass movement but it was a piker when compared to any of the secular mass movements. The same can be said for Islam today and its Islamist Mass Movement. These are dangerous but they cannot hold a candle to the truly deadly secular mass movements like Maoism, Leninist/Stalinist socialism, Nazism, or any of the other socialist movements. These secular mass movements generate huge followings and quickly become murderous, er, mass-murderous. We need to reform our government, including our schools K-12, higher education, and beyond. We have allowed these institutions to become deadly breeding grounds for dangerous secular mass movements. We are not just doing great damage to our young people, particularly our immature young, but we are endangering our entire nation if we allow these mass movements to survive and thrive in such a large percentage of our young people. The leaders in the political left, whether the progressives in the Democratic Party or the progressives in the Republican Party like the power these mass movements offer them. They understand that these movements will let them continue to mine the graft and corruption the progressive politicians live on. They also understand that these mass movements are a tool that allows them to consolidate power. Ultimately, this often proves dangerous to the political leaders which is why so many of these leaders turn into totalitarian mass murders, in part to consolidate power, and in part to control their excessively zealous acolytes. If this were just virtue seeking, and status grubbing, I could live with it. Luxury beliefs are ugly and damaging to society especially the lower classes and those with lower IQs. But this is not deadly, the mass movements, however, are deadly, and cannot be tolerated. AG Barr: Epstein’s death was a ‘perfect storm of screw-ups’
Anyone with any responsibility in this event needs to be fired immediately with no right ever to be rehired, or the federal government will lose even more public trust. No one should trust the DOJ at this point. No one should trust the FBI. Do we need to extend that to additional federal agencies? We need to do a soup to nuts reformation of the federal government. The bureaucratic model is done; it needs to be relegated to the ashcan of history. The new model needs to eliminate at least 50% of all federal jobs and over time, reduce the remaining jobs to far less than 20% of the number we have today. This will require both automation and a shrinking of the role of the federal government in our daily lives. |
AuthorMaddog Categories
All
|